Truly great songwriters hit people in a particular way - for some it's the sound of Neutral Milk Hotel's Jeff Mangum or Palace's Will Oldham. Others hear that extraordinary something in Bob Dylan or Neil Young - it can't easily be defined and is a power possessed by only the rarest of songwriters. It is bold to say, but 26-year-old Matthew Houck is one of them. As with the illustrious names above, behind Houck's songs lies nothing but the raw compulsion to write and play them, the fateful, joyful yearning to connect - the intuition that making music, for Houck, is inevitable.

The 26-year-old who now records as Phosphorescent grew up in Alabama, but the Southern cadence palpable in his songs is just a portion of Houck's story. At age 18, after a short attempt at college, he dropped out and began living out of his pickup and busking everywhere from New Orleans to the Southern California beaches for spare change. Eventually Houck began adding originals into his repertoire of old folk and country covers and started booking himself into bars and coffee shops around the country. On a random stop at a youth hostel in Austin, TX, a UK booking agent happened upon one of Houck's sets and bought his home-recorded CD. A month or so had passed when the booking agent contacted Houck to book a solo tour in the UK-so off he went into a cascade of praise from the fickle UK press, who hailed his Dylan-inflected folk as a next big thing. Upon returning to the States, Houck landed in Athens, GA. Turning down offers from overseas labels and talent agencies, he abandoned the one-man show, and began again as Phosphorescent.

Houck's Phosphorescent has recorded two frighteningly brilliant works, 2003's A Hundred Times or More and 2004's The Weight of Flight EP, both released on the Warm label to quiet but lavish praise. While they weren't widely heard, those who that did tune in felt the spark in Houck's cracked voice, wondered at the weird and beautiful poetics, sensed the involuntary smile behind the lyrics, and settled in for the ride.

Now, Aw Come Aw Wry moves the band's loose, ever-shifting arrangements away from the sparse and melodic and toward the rowdy and unhinged, at times conjuring a free, revival-tent spirit awash in homespun orchestrations and brushed with spiritual and psychedelic undertones. Let the dense and enchanting intimacy of these personal yet universal songs soak in, turn them up and sing along. You'll find not the sterile, self-consciously literate verses of an English major - this is a poetry that emanates directly from heartache and joy and lust and the incomparable feeling of losing and finding yourself again and again. Wrapped in a gauze of surreal imagery, and backed by an always revolving (and expanding) ensemble of horns, pump organ, piano, pedal steel, fuzzed guitar, choral voices and percussion, Phosphorescent is entrancing, unruly, cacophonous. Like a snapshot taken through a moving car's window, Aw Come Aw Wry is hazy, imprecise, yet intimates something perfect and possible; it's the only souvenir you've got of a life glimpsed on the way to the next town.